Volume 1, Chapter 11: The Weather Has Chosen Violence (Patreon)

White walls surrounded me on every side, crumbling upward into fragments frozen in time as they strained toward the sky. A blue abyss stared down at me, undisturbed by so much as a single cloud.

I rose from the floor despite having no body and looked around, focusing on the thin black line drawn across the middle of the wall encircling me. The darkness seemed to vibrate and shift up and down whenever I looked away, pretending to be a horizon.

First, I could think, so I was still alive.

Second, everything already hurt, so adding more pain came with diminishing returns.

Third, I had survived this much. I would survive whatever came next.

Fourth, I could still count, which meant my mind was still working and I could still rely on myself.

I repeated the mantra that had preserved my sanity every time Penrose dragged me through another of his brutal training sessions.

Wherever I was, I felt certain that as long as I did not allow myself to fade away and dissolve into a sea of nothingness—as long as I remained myself in the face of adversity—I would find a way out of any problem.

Heat reached with its greedy tendrils toward me, lashing my nonexistent skin and baking me as though I were inside an oven. It grew so unbearably intense and exhausting that everything around me darkened once again.

“Wake up! Get up, um… quickly!” Brigid hovered above my face, tongues of flame licking across my skin. Her voice was pleading but determined. “Please. I’m begging you. I need you,” she added, lowering her voice.

When I opened my eyes, she was turning to look at something on the horizon. Despite the pain pressing, stabbing, and burning in so many places that I could barely count them, I gritted my teeth and turned my head in the direction she was facing. Tiny stones scraped across my cheek, scratching it even further, but I quickly understood her concern.

The sandstorm I had seen from the opposite bank was still drawing closer. Within minutes, it would be upon us, ready to swallow us whole. Then I realized I was on the fucking opposite bank and began to chuckle.

“You’re alive!” Bri cried, instantly pulling away and turning toward me.

In doing so, she left the shelter of the larger rocks. Pebbles and sand carried by the wind began bombarding her and pushing her through the air. Struggling against it, her flaming hair whipped violently by the force of nature, she lowered herself again and hid behind another rock farther away from me.

Despite the scratching in my throat and the coughing fit that seized me, my chuckle slowly and clumsily grew into wild, unhinged laughter broken by bouts of coughing.

I could not stop. The muscles in my stomach protested against the painful convulsions caused by those sudden movements, but I kept laughing.

“Why are you, um… laughing, Lex?” Bri asked, but I could not answer.

I rolled onto my side and spat blood onto the flat stone beneath me, still laughing as tears began streaming down my face.

“Did you hit your head? Um… let me examine you. I’ll check.”

“Bri…” I finally whispered when I ran out of breath. “I made it.”

“Um… What?”

“I made it, Bri. Thrown into an alien world beneath an alien sky, one that took millions of other people within hours, and I—Alexander fucking May—made it.”

I smiled at her, rolled onto my stomach, and planted both hands against the ground. Pushing myself up into a crouch, I slowly rose and took shelter behind a rock, peering out at the approaching storm.

“The danger, um… isn’t over yet. Those clouds don’t look friendly,” Bri added.

At that exact moment, a white-yellow bolt of lightning struck the sand at the front of the advancing storm. The noise surrounding us was so overwhelming that the thunder reaching us several seconds later was barely audible.

I focused on my Daimon for a moment, sensing that something inside me had changed and searching for information about what it might be.

[Initiating soul diagnostics… Psyche driven to failure… Regeneration required… Estimated time until full recovery: approximately six Earth hours.]

The phrase full recovery raised certain questions, but I had a more urgent problem in front of me, so it did not concern me as much as it probably should have.

[Additional information: Event Achievement Point earned: 1. Source: “You wrung literally everything your Psyche had to offer out of it on your very first day. Few are capable of managing their own soul with such recklessness and stupidity. Well done!”]

What the fuck? I thought, fighting the dizziness that had plagued me since I opened my eyes.

“Sorry—” I began, but never finished.

Instead, I quickly covered my mouth with one hand as the contents of my stomach surged upward. I turned away from Bri, pulled my hand aside, and vomited onto the rocks. Once. Then again.

“What, um... happened?” Bri kept glancing toward the approaching storm, her attention divided between me and the darkening sky.

“Now I have… even less… fluid inside me,” I muttered, wiping my mouth with one hand once I was certain there was nothing left to throw up. “I clearly… overdid it with the magic.”

Recovering from that, I considered what to do. The mesa looked to be about a mile away, its stone walls almost certainly offering better shelter than anything we could find here. But that meant running a mile across sand while the storm was perhaps ten minutes away from reaching the point where we would no longer be able to do anything.

I quickly opened my bag, sliding it around to the front of my body, and looked inside while trying to decide what to do with Bri. I could not put her in the bag because the entire thing would inevitably catch fire. I had nothing else in which I could carry her while running, and the wind was already tossing her around like a scrap of paper.

Then the broken broom handle caught my attention.

“Bri.” I looked toward her and realized that the hand I had created for her—the one that had saved me—was gone. I blinked and pushed that thought aside for later. “Can you, you know… attach yourself to something the way normal fire does and stay on it?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, widening her eyes. “Let’s try.”

I took off my shirt, wrapped it around the lizard carcasses stored in my bag, and quickly tied the bundle to the end of the broom handle with one of the neckties. Then I held it out toward my companion.

“Jump onto this.”

In one not-so-smooth motion, fighting against the wind, she flew from her position onto the makeshift torch and settled atop the bundle like an ordinary flame.

“I think, um… I’m on!” she shouted.

I jerked the stick sharply, intending to shake her loose, but she held on. I tried again, thrusting it forward and exposing her directly to the wind’s bombardment. Although her fiery hair was torn away and scattered by the airborne debris, only to reform from her core, she remained burning at the end of the stick.

“Okay,” I said.

Bracing one hand against the rocks, I forced myself upright. I closed the bag with the other, shifted it back behind me, and secured it with the belt made from neckties by tying the knot harder.

Then, despite the dizziness, my punctured foot, and my bitten toe, I limped down the slope toward the golden sand ahead. I slid over the uneven ground, keeping myself upright with one hand dug into the incline. Grains of sand lashed my palm and feet, but I continued descending toward the flatter terrain below.

“There’s, um… no going back,” Bri whispered, looking up the slope we were descending in a controlled slide. I knew she was right. Now that I had committed to moving forward, we would never make it back up the same hill—not against that wind and not across sand collapsing beneath every step. The only thing left for us to do was run toward the distant wall of stone.

As soon as we finished sliding and my feet reached the flattened sand, still broken by scattered dunes, I braced myself and ran toward shelter.

I headed for the small waterfall that had been barely visible from the opposite bank but, with every step I took, seemed more and more like my salvation.

I could only hope in silence—while also hoping the Daimon had no access to those thoughts and was not passing them along—that this time it would actually be drinkable water rather than another deception or some cosmic joke.

The sand irritated my feet with every step, especially the one that had been punctured through the sole. I instinctively protected it whenever I put my weight down, slowing my pace.

I had never had trouble running. Fleeing from someone or acting quickly under pressure was part of my daily life, but I usually did it at full strength and in an urban environment—not on an alien planet where the grains of sand were far softer than I would have liked.

Every step became a struggle, not only against my growing exhaustion, but also to pull free the foot that sank beneath the loose material collapsing around it.

The storm approaching from the side hurled more than sand against my exposed back, head, ribs, and chest. Fragments of stone flew with it as well. Most were still small, but out of the corner of my eye, I occasionally saw larger pieces—roughly the size of a finger—shooting perpendicular to my path.

The sand beneath me was moving too. The dunes shifted like waves, forcing me to alter my planned route several times so I would not be buried beneath one that, encouraged by the wind, had decided to relocate.

About halfway there, I glanced at Bri. She clung tightly to what remained of the increasingly charred shirt like the flame of a torch. Several small bone fragments had already fallen from the bundle I had made, along with dripping fat and God alone knew what else. Somehow—perhaps through a conscious effort on her part—the wooden handle itself had still not caught fire.

I could see that, for her, this run was a different kind of struggle. Even so, she was fighting for survival too, and so I deliberately turned my wrist slightly, using my body to shield her more effectively from the wind.

My good deed was punished moments later when the first larger shard of rock struck me in the ribs, followed by another hitting my thigh. Both blows knocked me off balance and stopped me briefly.

I felt a thin stream of blood running down my side, but my leg seemed to have been spared any serious damage. Limping because of my injured foot, I pushed onward.

Less than a minute later, the stones began flying far more frequently, and the shadow of the approaching cloud turned midday into night.

Brigid became my only source of light, though I had little use for it. I was already shielding my face with my free arm against the intensifying bombardment of sand as I forced my way forward.

Lightning struck intermittently, illuminating the shitstorm I had managed to land myself in. The thunder came at almost the exact same moment, shaking everything around me and slowly stripping away any remaining hope that we would reach the wall. It rattled the ground beneath my feet, throwing clouds of sand into the air and repeatedly knocking me off my already precarious balance.

Before the darkness swallowed my vision completely, however, I had seen that no more than a few dozen steps separated me from the end of my run.

So I fought for my life. Driven by sheer stubbornness and the desire to prove to those who had placed me in this cursed situation that I would not be defeated so easily, I forced my body beyond its limits.

To calm my mind, I began counting the seconds as best I could and kept putting one foot in front of the other. When my internal clock reached twenty-seven, my right foot finally struck something solid. When my left found firm ground as well, I slowed slightly and began sweeping my right hand through the darkness ahead of me, keeping it turned toward the approaching storm.

My fingers eventually found a large boulder. I forced my way farther between it and the raging wall of sand, finally shielding myself from the fragments that had been cutting into me.

Only then did I bring Bri around in front of me, using her as a source of light while checking her condition. She had shrunk to half her usual size, and her face had disappeared completely. All that remained was a flame illuminating a small recess in the cliff face, which was somehow overgrown with blue grass, clinging to the rock and stone and pointing upward, like some kind of fur on an animal.

I placed the torch on the ground in the corner of the natural shelter, far enough from the vegetation that Bri could not accidentally do anything foolish. I refused to panic, choosing to believe she was still alive and merely weakened.

Then I moved closer to the strange plant. Despite looking like ordinary albeit wide blades of grass, aside from their blue color, they grew in thick clusters directly from bare stone. I gently ran a finger along them and pulled one blade away from the wall, where they clung tightly.

Moisture trickled down its surface. I pulled harder, and a considerable amount of water spilled from behind the displaced grass. Excited, I did it again, this time cupping my other hand beneath it to catch the falling water. Again and again, I pulled the grass aside and drank whatever I managed to collect.

My lips burned as moisture returned to them. The cracks caused by dehydration eagerly reminded me that I had allowed them to form in the first place. My throat reacted just as painfully to the liquid flowing down it.

I ignored the pain and drank. And drank. When I finally finished, I sat beside Brigid and closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them again, the dreadful roar of the wind and the percussion of the storm would be gone.